Tuesday, December 21, 2004
I left the OpenBSD 3.6 kernel rebuilding with patches last night, and it's still going! Immediately, I thought "Energizer bunny." And then I immediately thought, "That Energizer ad campaign has really worked too well." Why do I think of Energizer even in a situation where it doesn't apply? I'd like to give them some credit, however, for a recent ad I've had to walk past on my way to work mostly every day. It shows a young boy doing a pull-up at an exercise station like in a schoolyard, the Energizer logo in the lower right corner. there's no background—it's all a solid shade of pinkish purple. What I like about the ad is that the boy looks Asian but there are no other references to race evident in the ad. He's just an Asian kid, and this is just an ad for batteries. He's not doing a pull-up in a Chinatown playground. He's not wearing a special hat to protect his head from the rice paddies he works in after school. He's just an Asian kid. And it makes me think that if the Energizer people understand (or, in today's jargon, "get it"), why can't other companies? I am reminded of the brochure sent to be by my car insurance company, which, I think, is based in Rhode Island. They sent me a brochure full of smiling white people. Page after page of this white man or that white woman. And I couldn't help thinking if they even understood that in places like San Francisco those brochures really make them seem unworldly and lacking sophistication and intelligence. Cream of wheat, cinnamon, banana for breakfast. I made some holiday treats in the kitchen. Patrick did some Christmas shopping. I ran an errand to the post office. Late lunch: leftover Vietnamese noodle soup. Late dinner: pork chops, corn on the cob, skinny French fries, bread and butter. Watched White Christmas taped from TV. Because my computer's system clock wasn't exactly right, the computer failed to tape about the last 5 minutes of the movie. Oh, well. Today I spent mostly at home continuing to rebuild frankfarm.org. I tried to get Antec's EasyUSB to work properly with my KT7A-RAID motherboard. EasyUSB isn't easy. I changed the pinouts but I still have it wrong somehow—this is very hard to figure out. Afterwards I tried figuring out how to see my USB drive in OpenBSD 3.6—I still can't figure it out. However, I did set up the firewall, like yesterday piecing together bits of knowledge from various places on the web to create my /etc/pf.conf file. It also took me awhile to figure out that a lot of the information on the web about setting up an NTP daemon is outdated—a new ntpd called OpenNTPD is introduced in OpenBSD 3.6 and it's very simple to set up—simply add ntpd_flags="" to the file at /etc/rc.conf.local and edit the /etc/ntpd.conf file to allow the "servers pool.ntp.org" line and reboot (I think you need to reboot). I also set up DHCP and NAT but haven't tested it yet. No apparant problems so far, though. Patrick has been enthusiastically reading Sam's copy of The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. It's not his usual literary fiction fare, but he is very much engaged in the book. I haven't seen him like this since the last Harry Potter book (#5, I think). I am still reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and have also started Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. We received a holiday card from Bill and Glenn as well as a box of Joseph Schmidt chocolates from Tony Q—thanks! Patrick and I also baked cookies this morning—they turned out well, and we are pleased.